I was sitting here, on my big green couch, in LA, watching the NBC coverage of the Olympics. It was Saturday night and we seemed to have taken an unexpected turn into the story of World War II – not sure why and, surprisingly, it has prompted this entire blog.
For me, after years of growing up in England, watching BBC documentaries on WWII, something finally sank in that night, when NBC spelled out that the Germans bombed London every single night for 73 consecutive days (the Blitz). Really imagine that! Suddenly it was easy to picture being there, having to run deep underground into the bowels of London’s underground system – the subways – every night to sleep with 1000’s of other strangers-becoming-friends, and being dazed every morning as you’d come back into the light of day from the train tunnels only to see nothing as you remembered it from the day before. Rubble, rising dust clouds, eery quiet, silent bodies, missing buildings, unfamiliar sounds of recovery, loss and surprise. Death had come to visit. And it got me thinking… death matters; but why?